Recently there have been calls to expandSTEM education to include the arts and design, transforming STEM into STEAM in the K-20 classroom (Maeda, 2013). Like STEM, STEAM education stresses making connections between disciplines that were previously perceived as disparate. This has been conceptualized in different ways, such as: focusing on the…

What's funny about art--and why should art educators care? Art historians, critics, and artists are now taking a closer look at art that generates a laugh. This has particular relevance for art educators who seek to direct student engagement in new and exciting areas and embrace artworks that generally fall outside of the art school…

Public education today is mired in controversy, fraught with well-orchestrated attacks on teachers at every level, from Head Start to higher education. As pointed out by leading educational theorists Henry Giroux (2009) and Diane Ravitch (2011), under the guise of fiscal responsibility, powerful interests in this country have been able to convince…

In education policy, practice, and discussion, we find ourselves caught between responsibility--fidelity to one's experience, conscience, and discernment--and a narrow kind of accountability. In order to preserve integrity, we (educators and leaders) must maintain independence of thought while skillfully articulating our work to the outside world.…

Music education in K-12 school programs may continue to lose ground to other subjects unless music education and performance studies are viewed as interdependent. The author argues that the reinvigoration of both music education and performance requires that the studio experience integrate a research-based pedagogy, multi-stylistic range of…

In this article the author describes a project in which professors and preservice art educators from Northern Illinois University (NIU) collaborated with teens and members of the DeKalb Latino local community center to create a mural celebrating a traditional Aztec narrative. The mural project involved professors, university students, teenagers…

A commitment to providing students with multiple learning venues is the foundation of the Art Education program at the University of Missouri. Integral to the curriculum is the belief that all students, university and K-12 alike, should have the opportunity to view original works of art. Having access to museums at an early age sets the tone for…

Radical puppets are puppets with a social message. Radical puppets encourage creative ideas that lead toward understanding global and environmental aspects of society through the "art of the puppet," a phrase coined by American puppeteer Bill Baird (1965). There is a blending of performance and visual art in puppetry. Through radical puppetry,…

With increasing emphasis on multicultural art education and integrative pedagogy, educators have incorporated community resources, such as cultural artifacts exhibited in art museums, to enrich their programs. Cultural artifacts are human-made objects which generally reveal historic information about cultural values, beliefs, and traditions.…

Art is visual literacy, some would say more basic than writing and speaking, because it is not hampered by the barrier of language. The process of creating a visual narrative and understanding visual literacy is multi-faceted. Because similar cognitive strategies are used in the practice of both visual and written literacy, incorporation of…

Reflective teachers are always searching for ways to improve their teaching. When this reflection becomes intentional and systematic, they are engaging in teacher research. This type of research, sometimes called "action research", can help bridge the gap between theory and practice by addressing topics that are relevant to practicing teachers.…

Individual creativity is ubiquitous. New technologies both enable and urge fresh approaches to creativity in the context of education. University-level education offers a natural place to adjust pedagogical structures in favor of a more individual approach to learning that organizes the intellectual community into new patters of interaction and…

In this article, the authors first provide historical context for foundations in artist education at the postsecondary level. They then provide an overview of a first-year art program that challenges the status quo of education about the foundations of artistic expression. Finally, they address the implications of such differing approaches to K-12…

The "Adding Insult to Imagery? Artistic Responses to Censorship and Mass-Media" exhibition opened in January 16, 2006, Kipp Gallery on the Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus. Eleven gallery-based works, 9 videos, and 10 web-based artworks comprised the show; each dealt with the relationship between censorship and mass mediated images. Many…

In this writing, I explore the performative correspondences between the complex, disparate, and disjunctive encounters, alliances, and movements that characterize the making of art and the making of teaching that--according to philosophers Deleuze and Guattari--are constituted by the "plane of consistency," "zone of…